July 2, 2018 - Nearly two-thirds of procurement professionals believe regulations have increased risks to their businesses over the last three months, according to a survey of 600 professionals in the U.S. and U.K. conducted by Dun & Bradstreet.

More than half (53%) of the professionals surveyed said regulations hindered their ability to do their jobs effectively. Only 3% of procurement professionals were not concerned about the impact of regulation in the next six months.

One of the top concerns in the next six months is "internal training to ensure understanding of regulations," according to the survey.

The global regulatory and compliance landscape is in a state of flux. The United States is trying to reduce federal business, financial and environmental regulations, theoretically to reduce the cost of compliance and spur economic growth.

However, some states have actually increased regulations to offset changes at the federal level. To make matters more complex, many "front page" regulatory rollbacks are delayed indefinitely in pending court cases.

That’s a lot of regulations to track, and most of them impact some portion of the supply chain.

In a global economy, the new regulations around GDPR, changes in trade agreements, pressures on long term post war alliances and — everyone’s favorite — tariffs and the impending trade wars make the job of procurement professionals that much more complex and important.

But don’t look for that new career just yet. "From conversations with compliance and procurement professionals across the globe, we’ve learned that their objectives for these programs remain largely unchanged: to mitigate risk and reduce cost," a spokesperson for Dun & Bradstreet told Supply Chain Dive. So while the fundamentals haven't changed, the complexity of what constitutes risk certainly has.

And it looks like it won't get much easier as technology and further global economic challenges increase. "The report goes beyond examinations into the current state of compliance and procurement and provides a 'sentiment score' for the professionals in these functions, to gauge the state of confidence, concerns, risk, technology and priorities of leaders in the space," said the spokesperson for Dun & Bradstreet.

Supply chain managers are on the front line in dealing with all of these compliance issues. As the regulatory landscapes in the U.S. and U.K. become more complex, compliance and procurement organizations have an increasingly pressing duty to put comprehensive due diligence programs in place.

"By benchmarking results and continuing to analyze findings periodically, we aim to provide supply chain and compliance professionals shared insight and a common industry gauge to measure how they’re performing and where there is room for improvement," the spokesperson said.

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